COMPANY NEWS

Brace for the Future

When construction companies build multi-level projects they must support the walls of the basement levels during construction. The traditional method of basement wall retention is to ‘anchor’ the basement walls by drilling through the retaining wall into the soil on the other side.

Construction company CityBuilt Group wanted to brace the basement walls of a major residential development in Homebush, Sydney that did not entail the delays that can occur when obtaining permission from third parties, to drill into their property.

CityBuilt Group asked Coates Hire to tender for the contract to ‘internally brace’ the basement walls, and the Coates Hire Engineering and Technical Services team delivered a bracing design that allowed the builder certainty of timelines on the project.

Internal bracing means the retaining walls of the basement are pushed back from the middle, rather than ‘pulling’ from anchor points outside the basement. Coates Hire designed a bracing system consisting of 200 metres of ‘Mega Brace’ (steel waler beams laid against the inside of the retaining wall) and 11 hydraulic struts that hold the walls in place.

The Coates Hire internal bracing solution was designed and specified by engineers at the Ingleburn office, installed by the Coates Hire installation team and certified by Coates Hire engineers.

“The customers like the product because it has engineers designing, installing and certifying it,” says Darren Browne, engineer at Coates Hire Engineering and Technical Services. “It’s a turn-key product and one less thing to worry about for the customer.”

“We spend less time in the set-up of our system and we are also faster in the dismantling because the system is fully pre-fabricated and modular.”

Toriq Isaac, director of CityBuilt Group, says his projects have to start on time to make them viable.

“The Coates Hire engineers do the design and certify it,” says Isaac. “For us, the Mega Brace solution was a chance to make sure of our start dates and our schedule.”